


Please Sir, May I Have Another Murder?

by Missy



Category: Psych
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, Early in Canon, F/M, Fraternities & Sororities, Hazing, One Night Stands, Partners to Lovers, Partnership, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1888968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Juliet and Carlton deal with the aftermath of a one-night stand while investigating the mysterious death of a party-hardy fraternity brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Please Sir, May I Have Another Murder?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> Written for Not For Prime time in '14! Thank you to Red Fiona for beta.

The crisp fall air smelled like pine, roasted pumpkin and rotting flesh. Juliet O’Hara cringed and resisted the urge to plug her nose as her partner, Carlton Lassiter, beat a pathway down into the wooded glen in which their vic had been discovered. They reached the forest floor and made their way to the small cluster of witnesses who wreathed the prone body.

Carlton crouched at the head of the doe, donning rubber gloves, his eyes scanning the body and the surrounding area for clues. She wondered what his eyes told him about the crime scene - Juliet’s very abbreviated experience was no match for Carlton’s at the moment, though she’d vowed to catch up to him. The odor currently overpowering her nostrils dragged her away from any further rumination on the topic, the scent of rotting flesh rank enough to be distracting. “What can you tell me about our john doe, O’Hara?”

She paused, considering the scene before her. “Well…he’s definitely dead,” Juliet observed, squatting closer to the decomposing face of what had once been a man of about twenty, medium build, with sandy hair and a dimple on his right cheek. “I’m guessing he’s been that way for two weeks.”

“Exactly,” he said, fairly rolling his eyes with impatience. “But what else can you tell me?”

Sometimes she swore he expected her to have a sixth sense of her own, one just as sharp as Shawn’s. She thought for a moment, studied the gross anatomy before her, then finally noticed the ligature marks around his pale wrists. “He was restrained,” she said. “Probably ziptied before he was dumped here. And the ties were probably zipped pre-mortem, judging from the ligature on his wrists.” 

“Good work, O’Hara.” She raised her eyes from the body. _I wasn’t O’Hara to you last night,_ she thought. But he patted her shoulders in an almost brotherly fashion before supervising the meat wagon’s removal of their doe.

In the quiet confines of their squad car, he said absolutely nothing to her, leaving Juliet to mentally fill in all the gaps between sips of chilled coffee. Did it mean anything? Or was it simply a factor of his eternal sense of control she was falling victim to?

Juliet glowered as they made it back to the station. They’d have to do just the thing he seemed to dread the most soon. Talk. Opportunity presented itself briefly as they stopped at the station.

“Carlton,” she began as he shut off the gas. “We’re going to have to talk about what we just did.”

“No we don’t,” he said. “There’s nothing to discuss. Our…lapse in judgment happened because of the alcohol. There’s nothing more to it.” 

“Yes we do,” she hissed. 

“I understand that as a woman…” She stuck out her index finger in silent warning and he immediately paused to reconsider his words. “I understand that what occurred between us was surprising in its intensity. But for the good of our new partnership, I want you to forget anything transpired between the two of us the other night. There’s no need to get emotional simply because we got a little sloppy after the baseball game,” he said. “We were both on a high after our team’s victory. Nothing to cause a fuss about.”

“You call that a little sloppy?” Juliet asked. “We necked in front of Buzz and Woody!” She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and groaned. “Buzz and Woody, do you hear what I just said? It’s like I’m living in a Toy Story movie.”

Carlton shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sure they understand that it was a mere lapse in judgment. Strode’ll stay quiet, and Buzz knows better than to open his mouth unless I tell him otherwise. Why, Victoria and I have been separated for barely a week – I’m sure they know I wouldn’t just settle down with another woman the second the two of us uncoupled.”

“Thanks,” she said sarcastically. “Are you really sure?” she worried, while another part of her clenched against the pain of quasi-rejection.

“Positive. Don’t worry your steely little head about it.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Steely? That almost sounds like you respect respect.”

“You’re nearly out of the trial period,” Carlton shrugged. “Almost a full-fledged detective. Almost.” 

“Do you have to talk to me like I’m a little kid?” But even as she said it, Juliet became aware of the fact that she was pouting like a child.

“Only if you insist on continuing to ignore my sterling advice. Now shall we go back to the station?”

“Only if you buy me lunch after we hear Woody’s findings.” 

“Now that’s an excellent example of inappropriate behavior,” he declared, and opened his car door. “Shall we?”

*** 

“Hiya, hotlips!”

Down in the coroner’s department Woody Strode waited, wild-eyed and be-labcoated over the body. Juliet cringed at his idea of a joke and straightened her shoulders. “What do we have, Woody?”

“One fine young corpseable!” He approached a shrouded corpse sprawled upon his autopsy table and pulled back the plain blue cloth. From this vantage point Juliet could finally study Sam’s features under a brighter light, and she decided that under normal, non-autopsy related circumstances, she might have called him cute. Woody continued, “He’s one Sam Stone, missing from the Fraternity of The Royal Wombats for two weeks according to a quick database search. Cause of death looks like blunt force trauma to the head, and on his little trip down the rabbit hole he scrambled whatever was left of his mind after the cocaine got through with it. And it left one heck of a bruise on his backside. Someone likes to get kinky!” He then held up two tiny plastic bags that carried a weather-worn look. It had been clearly lifted from the corpse’s back pockets, and Juliet tried not to let her imagination wander to what Woody might do with the envelope later.

Carlton’s mind was clearly on other things; he slammed his fist into the autopsy table in triumph. “I knew it! He seems too well preserved for a four weeker,” Lassiter remarked. “But he’s also too well-preserved to be a two weeker. Something, or somebody, put mister Stone on ice.”

“Geez, stop stealing my thunder will ya? I think somebody stuffed him into a refrigerator before dumping him, thanks a lot for the spoiler.” said Strode, drawing back the blue cloth draped across the body’s lap. He gestured towards its legs. “He’s got freezer burn on his wrist and his upper thigh. Either he got even kinky with a blast freezer or he was exposed to extreme cold before he died.” Woody added thoughtfully, “I think I’d kill to party with this guy.”

Juliet examined Sam’s frozen, purple fingers, his white-yellow nail beds and the stiffness of his elbows. “The last cold snap was on Monday, and he’s completely thawed – so he’s probably been out of the box for less than a week.” She raised an eyebrow. “Somebody held onto him before killing him.”

“Excellent work Juliet – I mean, O’Hara,” coughed Lassiter. “Keep up your good work and I’ll commend you to the chief. Strode, run a toxicology screening on him. I want to know if they shot him up with anything before they dumped him. If it’s only the coke we can cross doping off our perp’s rap sheet.” 

“Already on it!” Woody crunched the plastic bag in his fist. “I wonder what would happen if I skooshed a little water in…”

“Do not get high off of our evidence,” Lassiter blurted.

“Fine,” Woody said, then added under his breath, “I just won’t share any with you…”

“Strode, if you don’t seal your lips and get to work on the toxicology reports, you’re going to be a dead coroner slicing.”

“Got it, got it…” then he raised an eyebrow. “Hide all videos and erase all audio tapes, got you.”

Lassiter facepalmed as Juliet yanked him from the room by his elbow. They had a case to solve, and bantering with their friend wouldn’t help them get there.

*** 

Carlton paid for a round of Chinese food, and they arranged the boxes like soldiers around the filestacks of paper and plastic laminate. They envisioned the woods, the long path to the floor of it, the length to which somebody would have to go to drag a body from the highway to the shallow grave they’d dug for Sam. Whoever had done it must have harbored a clear hatred for the kid.

Lassiter had pulled files for the man, and found nothing out of the ordinary. “The poor schlub didn’t even have a girlfriend,” he said, around a mouthful of chicken chow mein. “But he was apparently pretty popular with his frat brothers. A few of them are coming in to help his folks claim the body, and it might be a perfect time to interview them.”

A loud, deep-throated wailing sound drew Juliet’s attention to the doorway. She eyed the two men making it – one was skinny and had a very long beard, the other was chunky and sported a beany. “You take stretch, I’ll take fatty fatty two by four.”

“Carlton!” she hissed at his insensitivity. But he had already abandoned the food to draw the young men into conversation.

**** 

“Stretch” was, in actuality, a junior named Bobby who had been in the fraternity with Sam for over three years. They had both been partying hardy with him when Sam disappeared in the middle of a rager. 

Sam had apparently been a uniting force in the house. There were rumors that he was older than he said he was (Juliet made a mental note to have more records pulled) and he was certainly enigmatic and mysterious enough to be. He was also the most dedicated Brother they’d ever seen, willing to go to any length for the house’s health. Taking all of this in, Juliet let the younger man off without further questioning.

Apparently Lassiter wasn’t willing to take whatever Jake, the other brother, had told him. When Juliet entered the room he was in the middle of trying to talk the younger man into admitting he’d committed a string of unsolved robberies in the Bel Aire area, and he was in the middle of signing a search and seizure request through his tears when Juliet had intervened. 

“I almost had him pegged, Juliet,” Lassiter grumbled. They conferred over coffee about the stories they’d pulled out of both men, and the tales seemed to check out. 

“Could you please be nice to them the next time we have to give them an interview?” she asked.

“Oh please. I’ll bet you ten dollars that one of them’s the killer. We just need a warrant to prove it.”

To do that, they’d need to search the frat house – but they would have to try to do so while the men of the frat were otherwise occupied.

*** 

They soon got their chance. A little googling tipped Juliet off to a huge party at the Alpha Di Sorority house, home of the Wombats’ sister sorority, which meant the entire gang was likely to clear out for the evening to leave Juliet and Carlton to move in. Once the warrents were signed, they plotted the sweep, and met up 

To better blend in, the partners sported casual clothing, their guns and warrants jammed in the back pockets of their cut-offs. It worked well – they weren’t spotted as they reached the frat house. They broke through the back door with the help of Carlton’s .45 and they soon found themselves in the spacious confines of the house itself.

They were in, but they were lost. “I told you we should have brought Buzz,” Juliet said. He at least had a sense of direction, if nothing else.

Carlton redoubled her thoughts. “Oh please, that man gets lost finding his way around the station!” Lassiter cocked his head and pointed eastward. “There should be a stairway to the bedrooms through the common room.”

Juliet nodded, keeping her eyes peeled, her ears sharp, but following Lassiter’s every step. They split up and started searching rooms, carefully and slowly. A few minutes of nothingness seemed to be leading them right around in a circle – but then she entered Bobby’s room, spent a few minutes digging around - and found a cardboard box hidden under the bed. 

Inside were zip ties, a ball gag …and a paddle? She remembered the bruises on Sam’s body and felt a surge of inspiration. There wasn’t any real proof yet, but she could probably pull it all together into a proper line of cause and effect. She photographed everything with her cell phone and then called for Lassiter. 

He sighed in disgust at the display. “O’Hara, put away that poor boy’s…” he searched for the right word. “Sexual enhancement aids.”

She grimaced. “Carlton, those aren’t sex toys! Look, there’s a bottle of hot sauce and a pair of rubber underwear!”

“Dear God, don’t let Strode see any of this.”

“I bet they’re hazing supplies! We’ll need to dust them for prints, but how are we going to get them out of the house without anyone noticing?”

“Leave it to me,” he said. In the dust and rabble of floor, he found a jute backpack. 

“How did you know he’d have a free backpack?” she wondered.

“O’Hara, college men haven’t changed in a millennia,” he said. “Search any dorm in the county and you’ll turn up a hemp bag, a copy of a Tom Robbins novel and a bike sticker with Che Guverra on it.” They both heard a noise at the back of the hallway; thinking quickly, Lassiter threw the backpack under the bed – and Juliet grabbed him up in a kiss before either could truly process what else might happen to them. What had begun as an attempt at covering up their midnight investigation turned into a passionate but somehow chaste kiss.

They waited a heartbeat, heard a stumbling sound from the doorframe, then a loud belch. “Sorry, dude. Didn’t mean to interrupt…” 

Juliet broke the kiss and squinted at the figure in the door. “Shawn?”

Shawn Spencer was indeed thee, dressed like a man half his age. He gave them both a bleary smile. “Hey Jules. Hey Lassaaaie.” He toasted them both with a sweaty beer can.

“Spencer, what are you doing here?” Lassiter hissed.

 

“Just taking in the sights,” he said, scratching his chest with his free hand. “Frat parties are the best way to scope out free food and free booze. It’s like a goldmine nextdoor.”

Juliet pulled away from Lassiter. “Shawn,” she said. “Are you willing to do us a favor?”

Two seconds later, the threesome were triumphantly striding toward Lassiter’s cruiser, the evidence secreted in plastic bags from the kitchen – and covered up with a half-dozen beers stolen from the frat house’s fridge.

*** 

“Are we going to discuss that…incident at the college?” Lassiter asked Juliet as they convened near forensics a day later.

“I thought we weren’t going to discuss anything personal,” she said lightly. Lassiter coughed. 

“No – nothing was personal. I was just…surprised.”

She shrugged. “I needed to make it look natural. I had no idea Shawn was….”

“…Say no more,” he said. “Spencer’s known to cause bouts of temporary insanity. “ At that point, Buzz stepped out of the records room and then handed them both a stack of test results….while staring at his shoes. At least he’d kept his word about saying and noticing nothing.

They spread the files open on Juliet’s desk and started picking apart the results. It became quickly apparent that Bobby’s DNA was on the ball gag…but so was the DNA of forty other unidentified males – as well as Sam.

“Either he has the most active sex life in the history of the Wombats or you’re right and those are hazing tools.” 

Juliet said, “oh, I’m right – there are flecks of skin on the paddle, and they belong to Sam.”

Lassiter reached for the phone. “I’m going to need an arrest warrant for Bobby Mueller,” he said. “O’Hara – would you like to ride shotgun?” She grinned.

*** 

The arrest didn’t go as planned, to put it lightly. Bobby was a fast runner and – as they found out when they rushed into the middle of the college’s annual parade – he had a gun on him.

“Just drop it,” Lassiter said, holding his own pistol on the young man as the parade panicked in alarm around him.

Bobby trembled. “You don’t understand, man. We didn’t mean for it to happen. But Sam had to be the king of the Wombats, man. He kept telling me to push it, to push it, to push him! But he took it too far. I kept begging him to drink water but he wouldn’t. Between the beatings and the stupid pranks he just kept getting weaker. So then one day he did a ton of coke and then he passed out – he just fell and he hit his head, and we were all so scared without him, none of us knew what to do. I didn’t know where to put him so I dragged him away. He didn’t deserved to die that way, man, and Wombat protects a Wombat.”

His little speech proved distracting enough to let Juliet get a shot in, winging his wrist.

“I’m not a wombat,” she said.

He dropped the gun with a yowl, and Lassiter sprung to the arrest while Juliet kept a bead on him.

A few hours later, order restored, the public calmed, and Bobby headed off to jail for manslaughter, neglecting to report a death, interfering and unlawful transport of a dead body. Lassiter walked Juliet casually to the cruiser.

“That was a fine shot,” he informed her.

“I was just doing my job,” Juliet shrugged. 

“But you’re exceptional at it. I might be forced to agree to this partnership earlier than I anticipated,” Lassiter said. “As work partners…and perhaps dinner partners.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t want to talk.”

“We’re not talking. We’re eating in the same space in a genial and, if we’re lucky, convivial space. That’s all there is to it.”

It was a start. “We’re getting burritos at La Placca or nothing.”

“Understood.” 

“Let’s roll.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **Psych** , all of whom are the property of the **USA Network**. No money was gained from the writing of this fanfiction and all are used under the strictures of of the Berne Convention.


End file.
